


Shorts, Extras, Ficlets; Assorted Collected Extras for Home Out In The Wind

by bomberqueen17



Series: Home Out In The Wind [7]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (poe is the mom friend), Artificial Intelligence, Astromech Droids, Droid rights, Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, Menstruation, Past Torture, The mom friend, in-context racism, interrogation techniques, jacket thief, menstrual cramps, star wars droids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 16:19:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7514918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some of these are from Tumblr, some of these are deleted scenes or things that just didn't fit, some are things that I didn't figure out in time to include in the main timeline. I have a few to do and I'm still figuring out the format of this but I finally decided I'd been thinking about it too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Heat Pack

**Author's Note:**

> Also, in case you didn't get a notice, Never Wrote A Letter finally really updated too with chapter 3. :) The placeholder was great and all but now nobody knows I really put the chapter up.

This snippet happens just after chapter 5 of [Can't Go Home This Way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6902065).

 

Rey woke slowly, groggy. There were faint sounds, and her instincts dismissed them as _expected_ and _familiar_ , but it took her a long time to place them.

Right. The junkyard. The ship. They were trying to fix up the ship. Poe. Poe was helping. The little sounds were Poe moving around in the cockpit.

She smelled a faint hint of solder; he was fixing wiring. Good, his vision must be all right today. Tonight. Today?

He had refused to take the bed; he’d slept sitting up propped against the wall for a couple of hours in the afternoon while she worked, and when she’d found she couldn’t keep her eyes open, he’d told her he’d keep watch, and had sent her to bed.

She’d been unusually tired, so she’d agreed. By her internal sense of time, it had been a solid five or six hours since then, and was starting to get light out.

Her guts hurt like maybe she’d eaten something bad, and she curled into a ball and lay there for a little while, drifting and listening to Dameron scritching and shuffling around in the cockpit.

“Ow,” he said, sharp but quiet, and that was finally enough to make her raise her head.

“You ok?” she asked muzzily. He was sort of blurry, and she had to blink a couple of times.

He looked over at her. “Oh,” he said, “sorry, no, I’m fine, I just touched hot solder.”

“Burn yourself?” she asked, sitting up.

“No, it won’t even blister,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“I was awake,” she said, and oh wow her guts hurt, low and vicious, and her thigh muscles were weak with the strength of the pain. She doubled over, and let herself groan.

“You sound hung-over,” Dameron said.

“Tummy hurts,” she said. But even as she said it, she suddenly knew that it wasn’t something she’d eaten.

No, it was her goddamn reproductive system, which had never worked properly. This had happened once before. A month ago, in fact. Of course it had. She’d had menstrual periods before, but only irregularly. Now, the med droid had told her, as her nutrition levels improved, she was going to have them regularly, and they might be painful at first as her body’s hormone levels normalized.

“Did I feed you too much weird stuff?” Dameron asked.

“No,” she said, and made herself get out of bed and dig through the drawer for her bag, and find the supplies in there, and he’d definitely see but hopefully he wouldn’t recognize what they were because how would he know?

She staggered to the fresher with her little bag of supplies, and spent a horrified interlude being shocked at the whole process. It was so wasteful and dangerous to shed blood like that, and the blood was so weird and dark at first, the clots were so disconcerting, it was impossible to believe that she wasn’t dying, that this was somehow supposed to happen. It was so upsetting, it made her shake. She took a long time to get everything sorted, and a fresh pair of underpants, and she angrily scrubbed at the old ones, sure the stupid stain would never come out, how was this possibly normal. It was terrible. It was awful. It was the worst thing. There was no way that half of the galaxy’s human population put up with this every goddamn month.

She finally came out in a foul temper and got dressed. Dameron studiously kept his back turned; there was no privacy on this tiny ship, and she did the same for him when he changed his clothes, and it wasn’t awkward if they both pretended it wasn’t awkward, surely.

She fixed her hair, still angry, and came and slung herself into the co-pilot’s seat, since Dameron was sitting in the pilot’s seat working on the wiring.

He looked over at her. “Bad, huh?” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said, and called up the checklist he’d assembled for her, as she’d called out the various repair issues. Next on the docket were the stabilizers, and she would have to do those alone, because he couldn’t stand up well enough. Which was fine. Everything was fine and was going to be okay.

He bent very carefully and rummaged on the floor, then turned back and held out a container to her, and a spoon. “Breakfast,” he said, holding himself up with practiced ease as he rode out a bad dizzy spell.

She blinked at him, and took the container. It was a canister filled with some sort of lumpy goo, and as she opened it she sniffed tentatively at it. It smelled sweet. “What is this?”

“It’s a kind of grain thing,” he said, “and if you add water to it and let it sit it gets soft and gooey. Good substantial thing to start you off for the day. I put fruit preserves in it. I can find some plain if you don’t like that.”

“No no,” she said, and dug the spoon into it. “It smells good.”

“It’s good for you,” he said. “I could make caf too, I just didn’t.”

“I don’t really like caf,” she said. “So don’t worry about it.”

“Maybe we’ll have tea later then,” he said, smiling at her like this was some sort of secret he was telling her.

It took her a moment to realize she was smiling back. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe that’d be nice.”

She took her breakfast with her and finished it outside— it was sweet and savory and satisfying, and filled her stomach very nicely. Which helped with the gnawing pain down in her belly and thighs, somehow.

The muscle weakness in her thighs was really, really annoying. And it came and went a bit, but it never seemed to go far. “How do people live with this,” she asked the right stabilizer as she hung from the top of the craft to bang on it.

The stabilizer offered no answers.

Finally she slunk inside, exhausted even though she hadn’t worked that hard. It felt like her lower abdomen and legs and lower back were just all knots, and she wanted to cry with how much it hurt. It wasn’t like being injured at all, where you could focus and move past it; it was just too much of her body, and too constant, and too _gnawing_.

Dameron was lying under the dashboard when she came in. She dragged herself in and went to the ship’s tiny galley and put on a pot of water to make tea. Luke was really fond of tea, and she had gotten kind of a taste for it too.

Dameron backed out from under the dashboard after a moment, and she absently watched the muscles of the backs of his thighs and his rear end as he wriggled, then turned over and sat up. (He was very nicely-built, lean but not spare. Rey had never particularly noticed anyone’s rear end like that before.) He wobbled, and gave her a slightly-crosseyed look, his hair falling in his face as he steadied himself. “Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“I figured I’d done enough work to deserve a tea break,” she said, and it hurt to stand, so she sat down on the floor as pain washed through her and left her thighs weak again.

He laughed. “Of course,” he said. He didn’t bother getting up, but just crawled across the small expanse of floor and planted his back against the cabinet next to her. “It’s a good time for a tea break. Hey, you look pretty peaky, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chest and curling herself into the pain. It just. It just _hurt_ , and it wasn’t _fair_ , and how did people _live_ like this.

He pulled himself to his feet and rummaged through things, getting the tea things ready, she realized. Good. Great. She didn’t have to move. She didn’t want to move. This was terrible.

He sat down again in a moment, and slid over very slightly to press his arm just barely against hers. Rey usually flinched when people touched her but this was different, it was just his arm, he wasn’t grabbing her at all and it wasn’t pushy, it was just kind of— supportive, maybe. She liked it. “Hey,” he said. “Is it period cramps?”

She looked over at him miserably. “How would you know about that?”

He laughed. “Just because I don’t personally own the equipment doesn’t mean I have no experience with it,” he said.

“I never used to have this problem,” she said.

He stared at her for a moment. “But now that you’re eating enough,” he said, with a soft grimness to his voice.

“Well,” she said, “yeah.” She raised her head and looked at him. “How do people live like this?”

“It gets better,” Dameron said. “Mostly. And also most people get a— there’s a shot you can get.”

“They wouldn’t give it to me,” she said. “Not until I’d. I guess. Normalized?”

He nodded slowly. “I guess that makes sense,” he said. “Sucks, though.” He shoved unsteadily to his feet again and went and rummaged in one of the cupboards set into the wall by the door. The water made the rumbling sound that indicated it was ready to boil, so she dragged herself upright, ascertained that it was steaming, and made the tea. He came back with a small handful of things from the medkit, and she brought the teacups with her as she sat down next to him.

“Take two of these,” he said, handing her a small packet, “under your tongue, and until they take effect you’ll want to hold this.” He broke one of the chemical heat packs and worked it between his hands, then shoved it into a conductive gel pack. They were usually used for cold, to ice injuries, according to the directions on the packet; Rey hadn’t realized they could be warm too.

“Hold it,” she repeated blankly, and took it between her hands, mystified.

He gently put his hand on it and shoved it down toward her groin, smiling very slightly. “Oh,” she said, and he took his hand away.

“Heat loosens muscle cramps,” he said, and she pressed it gingerly against her abdomen just above her pubic bone. “If your back is bothering you, shove it between your lower back and the wall for a couple minutes. Or if you want a second one you could put it in both places at once.”

The heat had instantly loosened some of the pain, and she stared at him in astonishment. “No,” she said, “this is good.”

He smiled, dazzlingly. “Good,” he said. “Now take the tabs.”

She obeyed. Once the tabs had dissolved, she said, “How do you know this?”

His smile went soft and a little sad. “Sometimes I know things,” he said.

They drank tea and he brought up the list again and they discussed it, and she noticed that he was really having trouble with his eyes, couldn’t read the list at all, and said, “Did you sleep?” and he put her off, but she persisted. Finally he agreed to lie down for a bit, but he still refused to take the bed. She eventually got him to curl up on the floor in a little pile of cushions, and tucked her heat pack in with him for safekeeping.

He looked like he was going to protest, but apparently thought better of it and pulled the heat pack in against his chest, curled around it, and passed out.


	2. Boot-Up Dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short I originally posted on Tumblr some time ago, in which Poe, newly with the Resistance, makes the acquaintance of maintenance chief Goss Toowers, who is plot-significant later.  
> Mostly, featuring BB-8 being cute and Poe being overprotective, and some perhaps darker than I intended droid rights backstory.  
> Also, this is kind of an apology for being behind schedule on the main story, as expected. Chapter 4 is coming, but not tomorrow. :(

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This sort of got Jossed by my doing further research and discovering that, contrary to how the air forces of every civilized Earth nation actually work, pilots in the Star Wars universe generally are expected to maintain their own craft. This is actively horrifying to me, but surely there's an in-universe explanation besides "nobody really bothered to look up how freaking hard it is both to fly and to maintain a craft and so no fucking way", and I'm trying to incorporate that into my worldbuilding. But in the meantime, the premise of this section is that any respectable maintenance personnel would be justifiably annoyed to find a pilot mucking around with tools in their workspace.

 

“You know,” Goss Toowers said, leaning in the doorway, “our mechanics are equipped to work on astromechs too.”

Poe glanced up at the Shozer mechanic, caught flat-footed; he had BB-8’s sensor array all spread out on a dropcloth in front of him, and it was clear as anything he was doing his own maintenance work, and he hadn’t planned on rubbing it in anyone’s face exactly, but this was a little bit irregular. 

_ Great start to working with the Resistance, champ _ , he told himself.  _ Very diplomatic _ . 

“I, ah,” he said. He set the multitool in his hand down carefully. He was a bit nervous as a mechanic, especially with sensitive stuff like this; he always had to lay it out carefully and then constantly re-check and keep everything in relative position so he remembered where it went to put it back together. “You know, you guys have enough to do, keeping up with all the dumb shit I do to the damn craft, I figured, I’d just do the shit I know how to do and not bother you unless it was really a problem.”

Shozer facial expressions were hard to read, since they were big reptilian things; Poe really hoped this guy wasn’t as disgruntled as he looked. 

“Fair enough,” Goss said. “But we’ve all been wanting a look at that little astro of yours, he’s different.”

“BB-8 is one of a kind,” Poe said, and it was a defensive catchphrase. He had a reputation for spoiling his droid, for being inappropriately indulgent of the thing, but it was all a pretty calculated plan, which he camouflaged by being really flippant about it. “And um. My mom never let me have a pet so I’ve kind of. Done all the things you’re not supposed to do.”

Goss made an alarming noise, but it was pretty clearly a laugh. “Pilots always fuck up their astromechs,” he said, “we’re used to it. What’s yours do now?”

“Ehm,” Poe said. “Well, I mean. I’m just cleaning the sensor array, I think the weatherseal is starting to go. But you mean, specifically or in general, what’s BB-8’s deal?”

“Yeah,” Goss said, “both specifically and in general. There’s only ever two ways this goes-- a pilot either treats their astromech super shitty and the thing gets a complex, or the pilot treats it way too nice and it gets a complex. So I’m figuring, since you’re in here doing this instead of hitting on girls or whatever it is that you hit on, because that’s what pilots do, you’re probably the second kind. So what kind of complex does BB-8 have?”

Poe laughed so hard he almost lost his place, and had to take a moment to re-count the lenses of the sensor array to make sure he had them in the right order. “Oh,” he said, “so you’ve worked with pilots before. Fleet pilots are the worst ones, don’t you think?”

“Depends what you mean by worst,” Goss said, hunkering down to look at the assembly. “Oh holy shit you upgraded the holocam in this thing, that’s like a protocol droid rig.”

“I did,” Poe said. “BB-8, um, really likes taking pictures.” And BB’s love of obsessively-documenting things had, in the past, been extremely useful to Poe, and that was not the sort of thing one mentioned when one was trying to come across stupider than one was. “Also I got a good deal on the parts, don’t get me wrong. I spoil the shit out of my droid but I’m not crazy.”

“So you have a lot of non-spec parts in there, is what I’m getting from this,” Goss said. 

“Mm,” Poe said, and shot him a sidelong look, “yes.” 

“I bet he’s got a lot of non-standard programming too,” Goss said. 

“A little,” Poe said. “I’ve also-- I’ve let the AI kind of, develop? I know most people’s policy is to prune that shit back every so often but I’ve found that if you let the quirks work themselves out, the thing winds up smarter? A little idiosyncrasy is kind of worth putting up with if it’s meanwhile developed the smarts to save your ass.”

“Idiosyncrasy,” Goss said, skeptical.

Poe blew dust off the lens assembly, gave it a final polish, and started reassembling it. “BB-8’s got some preferences,” he said, “and I’ve found that instead of trying to rewrite the subroutines that gave rise to them, if I just go with it, I tend to get a better end result? So like. Um.” He was always a little self-conscious about this, because some people got so worked-up over it, like it was a ridiculous request. “BB-8’s not a he, or a she, or an it, because a droid isn’t male or female or an object.”

“Oh,” Goss said, sounding interested. “Then what  _ is _ \-- BB-8?” He didn’t use a pronoun, and that was hopeful. 

“BB-8 likes it when you say ey instead of he or she,” Poe said. “And like. Em for him or her. Eir for his or hers. Emself, not him- or herself.” 

“Ey,” Goss said. He squinted, or something like that. Poe had never known a Shozer closely before but he’d had conversations with them. “I think I knew someone who used those before. Well, I’ll try to remember. Does ey get mad if you forget?”

“No no no,” Poe said, immeasurably relieved, “ey’s usually delighted you bothered to try. BB’s spoiled a little, but that doesn’t mean ey’s a total asshole.” He considered that a moment. “Well. I mean. Ey  _ is _ a total asshole, but not about that.”

“Show me an astro that’s not a total asshole, and I’ll show you an astro whose owner spends way too much time resetting it,” Goss said. “Had a pilot who’d reformat the thing every time it needed a recharge. It had zero personality, never had a chance to develop one-- just, back to straight out of the box programming every week or so.”

“That’s awful,” Poe said, sincerely horrified; he had to set down the lens assembly to recover for a moment. There was nothing more uncanny and unpleasant than a brand-new astromech. 

“Right?” Goss shook his head. “The thing was so dumb, too, I mean, it had no chance for the learning AI to ever learn anything. Worst part, though?”

“There’s a part that’s worse?” Poe asked.

“Oh yeah,” Goss said. “Worst part is, it knew it. Reformats wipe it clean but that don’t mean it didn’t know that had happened. It fucking knew how dumb it was and that it wasn’t right. So it was all the fun and total lack of sense of humor of a brand-new AI, plus all the glitchy weirdness of an old poorly-maintained AI.”

“I might be sick,” Poe said, and he was kidding, but he actually felt a little queasy. “That’s-- isn’t there a law against that?”

“There’s no laws for shit,” Goss said. “I have no idea what happened to that thing, but it don’t half keep me up sometimes at night. It used to cry when its battery got low because it knew what was coming. What a horrorshow. I didn’t know droids could cry. Talk about nightmare fuel.”

“No kidding,” Poe said. He swallowed hard, and picked the lens assembly back up, and finished fitting it back together. He’d used the compressor to get all the sand out of the socket for the lens assembly, then swabbed it out with solvent; now he rubbed it with the cleaning rag before fitting the lens assembly back into it. 

“I might have a set of weathersealing gaskets,” Goss said. “If you wanted to replace those instead of cleaning ‘em out all the time.”

“Really?” Poe looked hopeful. “I mean, I thought these were still good, but then ey had condensation inside the lens this morning, and I dunno, I found a lot of grit in there.”

Goss bent in and looked at the gasket. “I mean,” he said, “if it was anything else, I’d say it’s fine, but you cause more damage taking it apart and everything, so if it was bad before it’ll be worse now. For something this sensitive, I’d just replace the gasket. They’re cheap enough. Hang on, I’ll be right back.”

“That’d be so sweet,” Poe said. He pulled the lens assembly back out, and set it carefully down on the dropcloth. To stay busy, he used the compressor to clean out the vent filters in the body seam, they always got dusty. 

“Here we go,” Goss said, coming back in with a little box. “I don’t got the custom ones, gotta cut ‘em to size, but you got small fingers, you can probably do it without special tools.” 

Shozers only had three fingers, big ones, and Poe hadn’t really thought about that. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I’ve done it before.”

“You can see why it ain’t my specialty,” Goss said. 

“Yeah,” Poe said. He peeled out the old weatherstripping, and sure enough, now he could see where there were cracks in it. Goss held a headlamp to give him more focused light so he could cut the new stuff exactly-- the box had a good cutting surface in it, and then Goss helped him with the adhesive to get it to the right consistency. It took about fifteen minutes, but Poe had just spent an hour on the cleaning, so it was a pretty small investment of time, all told. 

“That’ll hold better,” Goss said. “Should do you a couple months at least.”

“I think the last time it got replaced was almost a year ago,” Poe said. “I don’t like letting it go that long but.” He made a face. “Fleet requisitions are sometimes a little tricky.”

“You mean you hadn’t sucked up to the right mechanics,” Goss said. 

Poe nodded. “Believe me,” he said, “I know about sucking up to the mechanics. But I ah. I married a fabrication engineer, and that made things-- well, you know, just complicated.”

“Oh,” Goss said, “I didn’t know you-- oh-- uhh.” He was trying to sound polite, but Poe recognized the distinctive sound of someone mid-sentence realizing they’d just flailed themselves into a brick wall of awkwardness. Because yeah. Poe had just defected, and he’d come here alone, and clearly Goss knew that, everyone knew that.

“We got divorced,” Poe said, “like, a year ago, it’s okay. She was very much a Republic loyalist, it wasn’t going to work out.”

“Sorry,” Goss said. 

“I am too,” Poe said. “So you can imagine, like, on top of the personal shit, that just made it real awkward to bother the mechanics about  _ anything _ .”

“Yeah,” Goss said. 

The rest of BB-8’s reassembly, Poe knew like the back of his hand; he tended to give BB-8 a good cleaning once or twice a month, on average, more when it was muddy, and this stuff was easy. Just a big brush, and a couple of screws, and about half an hour of work, and BB-8 was always so pleased upon reboot. Ey had a little just-been-cleaned dance ey always did, and it was one of Poe’s purest delights in this world. 

“You wanna see something great?” he asked. 

“Sure,” Goss said. 

“Lemme just boot em up,” Poe said. “BB-8 loves a cleaning, it’s like, eir favorite thing.” 

He fitted the last bit of plating, tightened the screw down until the cover flipped easily over it, and then toggled the reboot switch. BB-8 spun up immediately, eir sensors blinking to awareness, and recognized Poe with a happy little trill. 

“Cleaned?” BB-8 asked.

“All clean,” Poe said, grinning at him. 

“Whee!” BB-8 said, and did eir dance, spinning in place and then completing a full revolution of the lower sphere, with an abrupt stop and reversal at the end, bringing em straight back to the spot where ey’d started, right next to Poe. “Yay!”

“Aw that’s adorable,” Goss said. 

“I told you,” Poe said. 

BB-8 noticed Goss, and rolled a little closer to Poe, trilling a wordless little sound of embarrassment. “Hi,” Goss said. 

“That’s Goss,” Poe said, “he’s a mechanic here. He helped me replace your weatherproofing seal, your lens won’t fog up anymore!”

“Thanks!” BB-8 said, rolling a little in place. Ey was definitely doing eir best “cute” act. Poe leaned in and kissed the plating just behind eir sensor, where nothing would get smudged. 

“That’s my little beep,” Poe said, indulgent like a proud parent. “Pretending like ey has manners, and all.”

“I mean,” Goss said, “for an astromech, that’s very mannerly. You’re welcome, BB-8.” 

BB pretended to be shy and burrowed further into Poe’s arms. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am really disorganized and may have posted this somewhere else too in the meantime, and I apologize in advance if this is a duplicate, but I honestly can't remember. I just unearthed it and thought, crap, I meant to put that on AO3. So here it is.


	3. Jacket Thief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why does Finn get a derogatory nickname-- it’s not nice to call someone a thief, especially when you’re referring to an object that was freely given-- and yet BB-8 gets a sweet loving supportive discussion of eir pronouns? When Finn is a living person and BB-8 is a mechanical robot of dubious sentience?  
> The answer is that Poe advocated for BB-8 because he knew it was an issue. He doesn’t know yet how Finn feels about it, and whether the joke is funny.
> 
> So, this is Poe finding out how Finn feels about it, and BB-8 putting eir learning AI to use.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got a comment on Home Out In The Wind that I totally missed the point of at the time. I don’t want to get too autobiographical or whatever, but I have a kind of Situation going on lately and it was grossly exacerbated by varying things, whatever, this isn’t a blog-- the point is, I got this comment and it completely failed to intersect with my understanding in any kind of productive way at all. I misunderstood the comment, misunderstood the commenter’s intention, and was horribly rude and dismissive and confused and offended and in general acted like a fucking nightmare to this poor person. It was only on much, much calmer reflection that I understood any of it at all, and now it’s all sort of subsumed in the wreckage of my mental collapse surrounding the entire issue, which really has nothing to do at all with the comment and I am feeling many dismaying things about this but none of that is the point.  
> Long story short, though, I wrote a whole separate fic here rather than trying to sneak it into the main body of Home Out In The Wind, because I wanted to make it a gift fic to the poor commenter. But on reflection, that might come across sort of aggressive, so I’m not doing that. But understand, if you read this, it is because you were so right and I am so, so sorry. I would love to dedicate it to you properly and put your name on it, but I don’t want to do that if there’s any risk of it making you feel even more upset.  
> So, yes, you’re right, I should address that. And I am sorry, because I didn’t understand the question before; not that it wasn’t asked clearly, but that I just wasn’t reading it properly at all.

  
  


Poe was ostensibly catching up on paperwork in the lounge area near the meeting room, but what he was really mostly doing was sleeping off the stimulant hangover (again) on the padded bench while Finn worked on his own paperwork. He wasn’t truly  _ sleeping _ , per se, he was more  _ dozing _ , jittery and groggy, but it was less unpleasant than usual because if his eyes wouldn’t stay shut, right in the middle of his field of vision was Finn’s beautiful face, illuminated by the holopad he was working on, mostly slack with concentration but occasionally fierce as he worked out a problem.

It was like Finn exuded a kind of energy, Poe thought dozily as he floated half-conscious, his arms tucked under his chest cradling the datapad he was supposed to be using to work. (He was lying sort of on his face, and the datapad was pleasantly warm underneath him, which he appreciated because his hands and feet were freezing even as the rest of him was kind of gross and sweaty. He wished they had bathtubs here, but it was a very long time indeed since he’d had a bath. Yavin, maybe. It made him wonder, though, if Finn had ever had a bath, and then he thought about floating in one of the big wood-fired tubs in the community baths with Finn, and then he was thinking about Finn’s muscular thighs, and that was really a pleasant enough diversion that he floated in that one for a good long while.)

He’d fallen asleep, and he only realized it when BB-8 burbled slyly, quietly, “It was common practice in the Academy to draw images of genitals on the faces of cadets who fell asleep in public.”

“Guh,” Poe said, flailing his way to a sitting position. “‘M’awake! Don’t you dare!”

BB-8 beeped innocently. “Dare what?”

Finn was laughing so hard he’d doubled over. “Oh Beep,” he said, “oh, Beep, you-- ha! You think we didn’t do shit like that to each other too? I know all about that one.”

Poe rubbed his face, feeling the damply-telltale evidence that he’d been drooling. He knew better, he knew better than to pass out in public; apart from felt-tipped temporary tattoos of penises and proboscids and pseudovulvas and assorted other configurations of genitals, there were also usually embarrassing holos taken, and as a squadron commander,  _ the _ squadron commander, he really did not need to be making himself available for that sort of shenanigans. He looked blearily around, but nobody seemed to be in the room. “I was wide awake,” he said to B. “I was just-- checking my eyelids for leaks.”

“As you do,” Finn said fondly, and it was A Problem that Finn sounding fond was giving Poe such strong sensations in the middle of his chest, but Poe had about a million problems and it was far down the list. 

“Humanoid eyelids are inefficient,” BB-8 conceded. “Next time you upgrade my weatherseals, Pretty Pilot, you should upgrade your own.”

“That’s a great suggestion,” Poe said. 

“What did ey call you?” Finn asked, pulling up-- ah, he had a translation chart for Binary on his holopad. He was making really good progress on it, along with about half a million other things, and Poe was already mentally marking out space for how he was going to feel about Finn being a general, because surely it wouldn’t be long.

“Pretty Pilot,” Poe said, rolling his eyes. “Ey changes eir designation for me every once in a while. It could be worse. For a while I was Mister Thinks-With-His-Dick.”

Finn laughed until he cried, which was completely worth having spilled those particular beans for. “Well,” BB-8 put in, “he  _ did _ .”

Poe covered his crotch with his hands. “It made really compelling arguments, B,” he said. “You just don’t know, you’re not biological. You don’t know the kind of reasoning these things can deploy. It’s hard to counter.”

Finn was still laughing, hands cradling his ribs, leaning back against the side of the bench. “Breathe,” BB-8 told him, “it’s okay, he’s better now.”

“It was a brief phase,” Poe said. “I didn’t sign any binding contracts.”

“Do most astros do this?” Finn asked. Poe shook his head. 

“Most just use honorifics,” he said. “Master, sir, whatever. I didn’t like that. B’s got a differently-structured learning mechanism than most of them, so when I tried to alter the protocol, well. There were unintended consequences?”

“I made myself this way,” BB said, a little indignant.

“I know you did,” Poe said, and watched as Finn skimmed the translation chart. He was keeping up easily. “But I just. I think I confused you, initially.”

“You did do a lot of stuff I didn’t understand,” BB-8 admitted. “But I do this because I like it.”

“You’re not wrong,” Poe said. “You’re fine.”

“Ey has a nickname for me,” Finn said, frowning. “And I didn’t look it up, last time. What is it?”

“Jacket Thief,” BB-8 said, clearly amused at eir own wit. 

Finn’s expression didn’t curve up into a smile like Poe expected, as he skimmed the translation chart. “Thief,” he said, and he sounded a little offended. “Jacket Thief. You really call me that?” And he looked at Poe for confirmation.

“Jacket Thief,” Poe confirmed. Finn still looked upset. “It’s a joke, Finn. Because B got so mad at you for stealing my jacket. And then you hadn’t stolen it, and then I even formally gave it to you, so clearly it’s not true.”

“So don’t call me a thief,” Finn said, still frowning. He was serious. 

“Hey,” Poe said, “hey. It’s because you’re not one. That’s the joke. It’s not-- not funny?”

“It’s not,” Finn said. “I didn’t steal anything. I’ve never-- okay, I stole myself, and a TIE fighter. Okay. But acts of war are different things. I’m not a thief and I wouldn’t steal something.”

“That’s why it’s a joke,” BB-8 said, mystified. “That’s how jokes work!”

“It’s not funny,” Finn said, setting his jaw. “I’d rather be called a stupid serial number and not a person at all than be called a thief.”

“Oh,” Poe said. 

BB-8 turned to Poe. “Jokes are not funny?” ey burbled, plaintive. “But  _ you _ laughed!”

“These things affect different people differently,” Poe explained, glancing worriedly over at Finn, who was watching them with his heavy jaw set sullenly. He’d never seen that expression on Finn’s face and he didn’t like it. 

“Explain to him,” BB-8 said urgently, nudging against Poe’s knee. “Explain why it is funny! You think it is funny, so you can tell him why!”

Poe grimaced, breathed in and let it out slowly. “Ahh,” he said. “B. You already explained it. He doesn’t like it.”

“My joke is bad?” BB-8 asked, quietly, attempting to burrow under Poe’s knees. “Other people thought it was funny too!”

“Not everyone thinks the same things are funny,” Poe said. “It hurts his feelings.”

“Why didn’t you tell me it would hurt his feelings?” BB-8 demanded. 

“Well,” Poe said, “I didn’t know.” He looked over at Finn. “It can be hard to predict these things, Beep.” To Finn he said, “We’re getting there. Bear with us?”

“Take your time,” Finn said, the line of his jaw softening a little. But not all the way. 

“Ass Saver thought it was funny,” BB-8 said. “Mean Jokes thought it was funny!” 

“What,” Finn said, squinting at his translation chart. 

“Kare Kun saved my ass,” Poe translated, “and Jess Pava is, historically, mean to me. B, the fact that a woman you call Mean Jokes thought it was funny might give you some insight into the fact that different people have different senses of humor.”

“She saved more than your ass,” BB-8 said. “That is why it is funny. Your ass is only part of you.”

Poe rubbed his face. “Sure,” he said. 

“Jess Pava is mean to you?” Finn asked. “I never noticed that.”

Poe shook his head. “I yelled at her,” he said. “A while back. She hasn’t been mean to me since.”

“And that’s why it’s funny,” BB-8 said, sounding plaintive. “Because she  _ isn’t _ mean.”

“That’s not how jokes work,” Poe said, leaning down and putting his hand on BB-8’s sphere next to eir processor. “You can’t just explain them until the person you offended changes their mind. It doesn’t work like that.”

“It’s okay,” Finn said. “I get it. Nicknames aren’t supposed to be nice.”

“No,” Poe said, “but they’re not supposed to hurt either.” He patted BB-8 and sat back up. “B’s a learning AI, so ey’s just going to have to learn from this. Sometimes you think a joke’s funny and it’s not because it hurts somebody. To keep making the joke is rude.”

“I am not rude,” BB-8 said, recoiling in horror. 

“Well,” Poe said, and looked at Finn. Finn made a wry face, and Poe shrugged. “Call him something else, then.”

BB-8 swiveled eir sensor array between Poe and Finn. “I am rude?” ey asked, quiet.

“If you keep using it, yes,” Poe said firmly. “So pick something else, or be rude. It’s up to you.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My autobiography will be called Responding Poorly To Critique, probably. There's a reason this took me months, and it wasn't the writing part, it was the letting it sit afterward to make sure it actually said what I thought in the moment that it said. (It did, fortunately.)  
> 


	4. Delicate Tropical Flower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From Chapter 8 in Home Out In The Wind, I had to delete a scene in order to get the thing to hang together. This is the deleted scene.  
> Poe deals with some of the baby refugees from the middie cruise, and their overzealous dedication to the cause. He also finds out some uncomfortable things. It starts out fluffy and then isn't. Sorry.
> 
> There are some hints about the kind of thing I want to write about after Rogue One comes out but I have to see the movie first, so-- this is spoiler-free, and you can see whether I go this direction or not!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In [Chapter 8](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6372322/chapters/15569146), this was the scene transition. But it was originally the scene below, which I just polished up and finished. 
> 
> SO KEEP FUCKING JACKET GUY, BB-8 concluded. MORE OF YOUR BRAIN LIGHTS UP WHEN YOU DO.
> 
> “I’ll keep that in mind,” Poe said. “Thanks, buddy. I’m glad you’re looking out for me.”
> 
> DAMN RIGHT I AM, B said.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Two days later, after absolutely zero time in his own bed and an amusing but not exactly relaxing sleepover in the drafty hangar of a temporary base with six of their youngest cadets and several new volunteers they were screening as new recruits, Poe stood at the edge of the air strip next to a newly-refurbished T-70 and looked at the datapad that maintenance chief Goss Toowers had just handed him.
> 
> “I mean,” Goss said, “it’s a perfectly good craft.”

 

Midshipman Yakana bounced up to Poe, bright-eyed, and handed him a datapad, following it up with a salute so sharp Poe pretended to be knocked back by it. “Hey, hey,” he said, laughing, and resisted the urge to tousle her short hair. He returned the salute instead, out of politeness, but with considerably less sharpness. “Ease up a little, we’re not going to grade you on your form.” He looked down at the datapad, flicking through the roster. “All corroborated?”

“Sir,” she said, “yes sir, we researched them and verified their identities as well as their accountings of themselves. All have been screened and there are flags where appropriate, but the entire grouping is under the cutoff point for suspect criteria, sir.”

Poe remembered being sixteen, so he kept his expression more formal than he otherwise would have. “Thank you,” he said, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate having so much of the legwork already done.”

Yakana beamed, vibrating inwardly but remaining outwardly very still. “Sir, of course,” she said.

It was an experiment. They’d grouped a bunch of the kids together under adult supervision and established a couple outposts with them to process the welcome but suspect influx of volunteers who, inspired by the dramatic declaration of war by the First Order, were flocking to the Resistance. This particular outpost was where they were funnelling non-Academy, non-Navy pilots in particular, and so there was a big room full of bush and cargo pilots all filling out intake forms. The kids couldn’t do a ton of analysis, or anything that required being familiar with the ways people behaved when lying, but they sure could fill out forms, and they so far had demonstrated an almost alarming vehemence in getting answers to questions.

One thing the Academy taught you really well, Poe reflected as he paged through the intake forms, was making sure every single tickbox was ticked on any form you had to fill out. It was almost enough to give him flashbacks.

Yakana was still staring at him, waiting for something. Surely, Poe thought, he himself had never been that young. He remembered to smile at her, and jerked his head toward the building. “Walk with me,” he said. “Tell me what you think. Their stories all check out, but did anybody give you any weird feelings?”

“Feelings, sir?” She fell in next to him-- and he was not a tall man, there was no conceivable reason he should feel so tall next to her, girls normally were done growing by this age and towered over the boys in their classes. He remembered, now, being short at this age. Oh yes. He’d been this young once.

She was _tiny_.

“Like, did anybody seem like maybe they were lying,” Poe said. “Or that there was something they weren’t telling you.”

“Oh,” Yakana said. “Umm.” She was thinking so hard, her face screwed up tight with it, and Poe made himself look away so she wouldn’t see the fond look he was giving her.

Fuck, these kids were _children_. They should be attending classes. The Resistance just didn’t have the resources to teach classes. Yakana was surely getting good on-the-job training here, but she should be writing essays and doing problem sets, not interrogating possible enemy agents. And sure, she wasn’t doing the interrogating, but she was transcribing the interrogations.

It was the best they could do.

At least they weren’t interrogations with torture, or anything. For whatever that was worth.

“I didn’t notice anyone in particular,” Yakana said finally. “I don’t-- know if I’d know what to look for?”

Poe nodded. “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t your job. You did a fine job at your actual assigned task,” and he waved the datapad. “But it never hurts to keep an eye out.”

“Of course, sir,” she said.

That was really as much as he could tell her. Grabbing her by the shoulders and telling her _it’s not safe here_ would be counterproductive, and also wouldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. He knew her file: she had been the oldest of three children, and her whole family had been at home on the second planet of the Hosnian system when it was obliterated. She knew fine well there was no such thing as _safe_.

Either she would live long enough to learn to take care of herself, or she wouldn’t, and him terrifying her for no reason would make no difference. He stepped into the building and glanced in the doorway to the big room they were using for processing. Two dozen or so people were in it, all civilian pilots-- mostly bush pilots-- sitting around in varying states of boredom.

Poe ducked back out of the doorway before anyone looked at him, and went down the hallway to the little office, Yakana following. “I’m going to do one-on-one interviews in here,” he said. “I think it’s best if they don’t know whether to expect a military type or a civilian.”

Yakana nodded eagerly, but Poe spotted the hesitation. “What,” he said. “If you have a doubt, share it.”

“Your name was already mentioned,” she said. She screwed up her face, clearly thinking. “I don’t remember who said it. But they’re expecting you.”

“Interesting,” Poe said, frowning. “I didn’t even know I was the one coming here until pretty recently.” He’d been trying to keep his movements kind of… off the general radar.

He was struggling with whether it was cowardice or an overinflated sense of self-importance or a really sensible reaction to having an increasingly huge bounty on his head. He’d always been pretty good with being the center of attention when it was in context-- he never got nervous about performing music or anything like that-- but this was different and he didn’t know what to do about it.

Yakana had gone wide-eyed. “It’s because of the bounty on your head,” she said. “I didn’t think of that.”

Poe shrugged resignedly. “We gotta keep doing the math on whether I’m good enough at doing these jobs to warrant the attention it brings to how much more money our enemies seem to have than we do.”

Yakana looked fierce. “I’ll protect you,” she said.

“That’s definitely not your job,” Poe said.

Undeterred, Yakana set her jaw. “It is _now_ ,” she said.

  


There weren’t enough quarters on this planet for everyone to sleep in. Poe looked at the available facilities, and considered his options. He could make them pull an all-nighter so he could just leave in the morning, but he was already pushing the boundaries of proper rest times, and that would just leave the poor well-meaning boundaries writhing in the dust. He could commandeer the office and sleep there, but he knew the base commander already did that, and he’d be putting her out. He could sleep in his X-Wing just so no one would bother him, but BB-8 would insist on joining him and would express eir disapproval by bugging him the whole night. And then where would the rest go?

“Okay,” he said, and Yakana and her compatriot Hirrot, who he’d taken to calling her identical twin even though he was an Abednedo, both snapped to attention and stared at him eagerly. He pretended to be startled, as he’d been doing all day (along with pretending he couldn’t tell which of them was which; nothing alleviated tension like unbelievably corny jokes), and said, “Guess what time it is?”

“Sir,” they said earnestly.

“Sleepover time,” he said. “Fuck staying up all night, I’m not doing it.”

“We can get it done,” Hirrot said earnestly. Abednedos didn’t generally develop their really gross senses of humor until later, Poe was remembering; as juveniles they were just really really earnest. It was exhausting.

The junior staff all had fold-out cots in the main building, which was a kind of auditorium-cum-hangar. They’d made it through most of the interviews that they’d had to do, and had given the answers and future postings to the various volunteers, and most of them were gone, but a couple of the last to be processed were still around. They found cots for them, and one for Poe too, and he found himself in an enormous drafty room with an actual honest-to-goodness fire in a metal trash barrel, a half-dozen teenaged cadets, and three bush pilots who were awkwardly away from the group but as soon as Poe got the fire lit, came over.

“Anybody got any booze?” one of the pilots asked hopefully.

Poe gave him a look. “This isn’t that kind of party,” he said.

“Aww,” one of the cadets said, but it was dark enough that he didn’t catch which one.

“Can you sing for us?” Yakana asked, leaning forward. She had her hair loose from its braid and looked about seven in her bundled layers of pajamas and blankets. She clearly was used to how cold it was going to get in this room. Poe hadn’t brought proper pajamas but the base commander had loaned him an enormous soft hooded garment that fit him like a two-man survival tent, and he was kind of enjoying it and wondered if he could requisition himself one. Not that he’d ever be able to wear it anywhere outside his own hut. And in his own hut he often had someone to keep him warm.

Unaccountably, the thought made him blush. “I,” he said, “I didn’t bring my guitar, guys.”

BB-8 made an excited noise, and rolled up to nudge at him. The cots were quite low to the ground, but that meant that they’d managed to rig a good shelter out of several of them on their sides to keep the worst of the drafts away. They kept some of the fire’s heat localized, too. It wasn’t terribly cold, but it wasn’t going to be as cozy as Poe would like.

He was a delicate tropical flower, after all. (Someone had once called him that in a misguided attempt at romance. They’d clearly read a tourist brochure about Yavin 4, because they’d said something hideous about night-blooming flowers and exotic whisper-birds and had compared Poe’s skin to some kind of foodstuff, and it had been so icky Poe had just left while they were in the fresher afterward, because yuck. He _was_ a delicate tropical flower, but fuck that shit. People who said things like that usually soon moved on to wanting you to do slightly dirtier stuff than you’d agreed to because you were Outer Rim trash, after all. Poe had a kind of taxonomy of Terrible People To Not Fuck, and the phrase Delicate Tropical Flower was worth a lot of points in the bingo.)

“No,” Poe said to BB-8, “I am not going to sing along to creepy recordings you’ve made of me. That’s not what sleepovers are about anyway.”

BB-8 made a wordless, disappointed noise. Poe reached out and patted eir lower sphere. The cots were low enough that he could reach easily. B came and snuggled against him, and he lay down on his side and wrapped his arm around B, and enveloped em in blankets so that only his eyes and BB-8’s sensor array poked out.

Everyone laughed, and took it as a signal to get comfortable. “Nobody has a guitar?” Yakana said, a little disappointedly.

Nobody did. “Someone tell a story, though,” Hirrot said.

“I want to request one,” said one of the bush pilots. Poe peeled the blanket back a little bit as he tried to remember the woman’s name. He’d noticed her Iberican accent but hadn’t remarked it particularly. Yanita. Anita. Marita. Carina. “I want to hear about how the Starkiller got destroyed.”

Poe made a deep, low groaning noise that surprised even himself, and flipped the covers back over his face. BB-8 said, “I could just replay the transcripts?”

Poe flipped the covers back down. “No no,” he said, “it’s a perfectly reasonable request.”

“Easier for me,” BB-8 argued, and flipped up a holo, which was-- ey’d taken holos, of course ey had. A still of the approach to the base. And from the speaker, Poe’s own voice came out.

“I don’t think those shields are down,” the recording said, in Poe’s voice, and Asty answered faintly, “I hope that Stormtrooper kid knew what he was talking about,” and Kun said, “He fuckin’ better, man, I fuckin’--”

Poe sat up, and BB-8 shut the holo down in startlement. “Don’t do that,” he said, surprising himself at his vehemence. “Don’t-- please don’t. Not-- now.” He’d never sleep. He was thinking, already, of Asty’s last transmission, of Pava grimly counting down who was hit, of the awful way Arana’s voice had wavered just before his comm had cut out as he ditched.

Everyone was staring at him, and he was glad the hooded thing was so enormous. He tugged the hood down a little farther over his face. “I didn’t think about that,” Marita said. No, Carina. It was definitely Carina.

“We won,” Poe said, “but we. I mean. Lot of us didn’t. Make it back out.” He breathed out, breathed in. “In daylight, with enough sleep, I got no problem telling the story, but I am not gonna have my droid replay the recordings of my guys getting shot down. And then try to sleep in a freezing-ass big unfamiliar drafty building.”

“I suppose you’re not gonna wanna tell us about the Fall of Han Solo either,” one of the cadets said.

“Hell no,” Poe said. “I’m tapping out. All my stories are sad. Somebody else tell a story. I don’t even care if it’s a creepy ghost story so long as nobody I know dies in it.”

There was some discussion, and finally one of the bush pilots obliged with a funny story about a series of escalating catastrophes stemming from a farmer trying to go to market. Poe recognized the structure of the story, and knew it was one of the ones that storytellers told with adapted details-- need to fix the hole in the bucket, need to get a straw to plug it, need a knife to cut the straw, need to sharpen the knife, need to draw water to wet the stone, need to fix the hole in the bucket to draw the water.

He still lay with his arm around B listening to it, warmed by the operating temperature of the droid. He laughed at the points where you were supposed to laugh, enjoyed how well-told it was, and at the punchline laughed so hard he almost fell out of the cot.

He sat up, pushing the hood back to fix his hair, rocking with the aftershocks of giggles. And suddenly Carina pointed at him.

“I _knew_ I knew you,” she said in Iberican, sharp with recognition. “I know your father. You laugh like him.”

Yakana looked alarmed, Poe noted absently, possibly because she didn’t know what Carina had said. He extricated his hand from his hair, sighed bleakly, and answered in the same language, “I couldn’t tell you the last time I heard him laugh,” because it was true.

“He’s the harbormaster at-- at Garel,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Dameron. I should have figured it out sooner. He’s the honest one that makes you feel super bad about yourself if you try to bribe anybody.”

Poe shook his head. “Yavin,” he said. Garel was over in the Lothal sector. Just as Outer Rim, but not close by.

“Yavin,” she said. “Right. Yavin.”

Poe realized abruptly that Yakana was preparing to fling herself onto Carina. “No no,” he said to her, “no, it’s fine, it’s-- she’s not a bounty hunter, Yakana, it’s not code, it’s just Iberican.”

Carina looked around, confused. Poe realized Yakana’s sidekick Hirrot had been preparing to back her up. They’d clearly had some kind of signal worked out, that he hadn’t caught. “What?” Carina asked.

“They thought you were going to attack me and that’s why you were speaking in code,” he said. “Settle down, kids.” Everyone was stirred up now, unbalanced and alarmed. “I got a real high bounty on me and so we’re starting to have trouble with people getting sneaky about it.”

“I would _never_ ,” Carina said, genuinely offended.

“I know,” Poe said, switching back to Iberican, “I know. We’re just kind of on high alert, you know?”

Carina subsided slightly, not much mollified. “Why someone would think such a thing of me,” she huffed.

“You spoke sharply to me in a language she didn’t understand,” Poe said. “She’s sixteen and just lost her entire family. She’s latched onto me as some kind of protective figure instead.” He gestured, a sad shrug, and switched back to Basic. “We’re speaking Iberican, Yakana.”

“Oh,” she said, looking confusedly back and forth between them. Hirrot came over and sat next to Yakana, snuggling in with an unselfconsciousness that eloquently said he _absolutely_ hadn’t hit his sexual maturity yet. “Why?”

“Because we both speak it,” Poe said, “and clearly she’s more comfortable using it, and since she was speaking only to me, she used it.”

“How did she know you speak it?” Yakana asked.

“Like everybody speaks it,” Hirrot said, laughing at her. “We study it! Did you skip that class?”

“I placed out because I speak Han,” Yakana said.

“She knows my family,” Poe said. “That’s what we were talking about.” He rubbed his face again. He didn’t really want to think about his father. “Hirrot,” he said in Iberican, “if you know Iberican why didn’t you tell Yakana that you knew what she was saying?”

“Uh,” Hirrot said, big flat eyes going blank. “Uh, que?”

Poe glanced over at Carina, raising both eyebrows for a moment. Her hostile expression had faded a little to bemusement, and now she bit her lips so as not to laugh. He looked back at Hirrot. “So you studied it,” he continued in Iberican, speaking clearer and slower, “but how good were your grades?”

“Uh,” Hirrot said gamely, his accent thick and sincere, “my grades were very bad!”

It was really hard not to laugh. Poe squinted at him instead. “I see that,” he said.

“You must’ve been a really good student,” one of the other cadets said. Ganira, another Core Worlds human. Her voice was so soft with awe that Poe figured she had to be mocking him somehow, except her expression was totally sincere. Oh no, he recognized that expression: she had a crush on him. He was old enough to be her father.

He was so old. He was so old. Stars, how was he not _dead_ , he was _so old_. This was proving to be a more difficult mission than he had anticipated.

He scrunched up his face. He couldn’t laugh at her either. “It’s not that I wasn’t a good student,” he said in Basic, “but, actually, Iberican was my first language, I didn’t learn it at the Academy. Which is why Carina assumed she could speak it to me, and was correct.”

“You don’t have an accent at all, though!” Ganira said, shocked.

Made it easier not to smile. Poe chewed on his lower lip. “My parents were bilingual,” he said. “They raised me speaking both. If you learn both languages young enough, from people who themselves don’t have accents, you wind up without an accent. That’s how it works.”

“Don’t give people shit about their accents,” Carina said flatly.

Poe rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s more political than you’d think,” he said carefully. “If nobody in your family has an accent, you don’t really know what it’s like if somebody does.”

The cadets all stared at him. Yakana nodded slowly. “My mom does,” she said.

“My father does,” Poe said. “And I was so embarrassed when he talked to my friends at the Academy that I tried to avoid having him come.” He made a face. “You can imagine, that… hurt his feelings. But I just was so tired of being made fun of, that I spent years pretending I wasn’t Iberican.” He sighed. “So there’s-- if you want, like, great wisdom from the legendary Poe Dameron of the Resistance, there it is: don’t be a dick to your dad.”

“He’s so nice though,” Carina said, distressed. “He’s the nicest harbormaster in the whole Outer Rim, I think.”

Poe smiled. “I’m sure he was nice to you,” he said.

She shook her head. “I was warned,” she said. “I didn’t do much cargo flying stuff, but they told me, you know, if you’re flying through the Yavin harbor? You better really have your papers in order, because the harbormaster there, he don’t take no bribes. And I thought, you know, I got away with a lot back home if I smiled and flirted a bit, and my one friend said, you know, don’t do that out in the Rim, somebody’ll take you up on it, but I was real stupid, and I thought I was game for anything. And I mostly had my stuff in order, it wasn’t anything big.”

Poe closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “Tell me you didn’t try to bat your eyelashes at Kes fucking Dameron.”

“Well,” Carina said. “I thought, surely. It’s a Fronteras harbor.”

Poe shook his head a little more. “No,” he said. “No no. No.”

“No,” Carina agreed, “it’s not. There are Fronteras ships all over it, their crown sigil is all on everything, but no. No, it is not.”

“What’s Fronteras?” Yakana asked.

“They’re a gang,” Poe said. “You know what else in Yavin harbor has a crown sigil on it besides, like, every ship and half the docks?”

“What?” Carina asked.

“Kes fucking Dameron,” Poe answered. He contorted his arm to reach behind himself, and patted his own back, just above the shoulder blades, as far down as he could reach. “He’s got a big tattoo. But he’s not in the gang. It’s just a protection marker.”

“Just like the harbor,” Carina said. “Just like it. So his assistant is going over my credentials and she isn’t liking what she’s seeing, and she tells me to wait and goes and comes back with this big guy, and I think, well, that’s got to be the harbormaster--”

“Big guy,” Ganira said, frowning and giving Poe a keen look. She was tall, a sharp contrast to Yakana-- almost Poe’s height. She’d certainly noticed it.

“I take after my mother’s people,” Poe said drily, although it wasn’t that simple, of course.

“So I pour on just _all_ of the charm I can possibly muster, and I try every trick in the book, and he was just--” Carina laughed. “He was _so unimpressed_ with me.”

“I can vividly imagine,” Poe said. And it hurt. Oh, it hurt. He’d seen that expression a lot.

“He says to me, child, who let you out of the house like that,” Carina said. “He took me aside and went over and corrected my paperwork, confiscated the contraband I’d been trying to smuggle, and then when I admitted that I wouldn’t be able to make ends meet on just the legit goods I had, he went on and found an exporter with a small cargo who could squeeze onto my ship and work with the port I was going to, so I’d have enough to make the run profitable.”

“That is nice,” Poe said, a little surprised. He actually… didn’t know his dad that well as an adult, now that he thought of it.

“He also gave me the contact info for another exporter who he knew was always looking for small cargo hauling, for the return journey,” Carina said.

“Oh, wow,” Yakana said.

“That guy didn’t have anything for me,” Carina said, “but he referred me to a colleague who did, and I wound up with a really good gig to get me home again, way better than what the contraband would’ve gotten me. He really did me a solid, and when I thanked him on the way back through and asked him if I could do him any favors in return he said not now but maybe someday.”

“Wow,” a couple of the cadets breathed in unison.

“He seems so cool,” Ganira said. “I just-- a big guy, huh?”

“You’re really stuck on that, huh,” Poe said, unimpressed.

BB-8 burbled, as if waking up. “I have proof,” ey said, and projected a holo. It was a still shot, of Poe at age about fifteen, stuck in a headlock in his father’s arms, with Kes grinning straight at the holocam and Poe caught mid-struggle in an ineffectual effort to escape. It was a lot more flattering a holo of Kes, his bare arms bunched with muscle; Poe was likewise bare-armed, as it had been taken on Yavin, and by contrast he was a wiry collection of bones. He also was clearly much smaller than his father.

“Beep,” Poe said reproachfully, “that’s hardly fair, I wasn’t even full-grown in that picture.”

“You were 169cm tall then and you are 171cm tall now,” BB-8 said. “It is an insignificant difference.”

“I had noodles for arms,” Poe pointed out.

“You weighed seven kilograms less than you do now,” BB-8 said. Poe bit his lip, and cast a surreptitious eye out to see how many of those assembled understood Binary. Most of them, it looked like, from the general air of mirth. He met Carina’s eye, and she laughed, and that was enough to set him off.

While he was laughing, though, Hirrot had been staring at the holo with a thoughtful frown, and he suddenly emitted a series of excited clicks. “Kes Dameron,” he said, with an air of great revelation. “Oh! Kes Dameron! From the Rebellion.”

“Oh yeah,” Yakana said.

“Yes,” Poe said. “He was a big hero in the Rebellion, served with General Solo and all.”

“No, I know him from-- well, I mean, yes, that,” Hirrot said, “but the instructional holovid, he’s in that one about the IT-0s.”

Poe frowned. “The-- number one, why would he be in that, number two, why would you be watching it?” He suppressed a shiver; IT-0 droids were the ones the Empire had used for interrogation, and the First Order had them too, he knew intimately all about them.

“Oh yeah,” Ganira said. “We watched that-- oh, we watched it with Major Dekar while we were deciding to defect. It’s a good one.” She nodded. “He does have an accent, I remember that now from the holovid. It’s not a thick one, though, or anything.”

BB-8 said, “I have it,” and without warning, projected a holovid. It was low-res, much-copied, but Kes was easily recognizable.

He was young, shockingly young, and his face was gaunt, his eyes shadowed and bruised-looking. The holocam was at a low angle, recording him across a table, and he was sitting with his hands folded in front of himself. It focused on him with a whir, and he visibly suppressed a flinch.

“This is,” he said thinly, and stopped to clear his throat. “This is an accounting of everything I learned about how the Imperial interrogation process works, as done with droids and-- and agents.” He swallowed hard. He looked so twitchy, and Poe stared in sick understanding, knowing just what about that whir he’d reacted to.

“Beep,” Poe said faintly, “where did you get this.”

“It’s the standard instructional vid they show you in the Resistance,” Ganira said, “isn’t it?”

“The way the IT-0 droids work,” holo-Kes said, “is by a combination of distress and confusion. It’s very simple but very effective. They drug you so that you’re more easily confused, and then they apply-- negative stimuli--”

“I read this as a transcript,” Poe said, recognizing the words. He’d drawn heavily on them during his own experience. Knowing what to expect had-- well, it was hard to say whether it had helped. “They didn’t-- they didn’t--” He had to pause. Holo-Kes had paused too, and had turned his head, clearly taking a moment to compose himself. He was _so young_.

“You never saw the holovid?” Yakana asked.

“No,” Poe said. “They didn’t-- leave the original agent’s name attached to the transcript.”

“Oh,” she said, and Ganira echoed it.

Mercifully, BB-8 stopped the recording. “I thought you’d seen it,” ey beeped, subdued.

Poe shook his head. “I never,” he said, but didn’t know how to continue. Kes had been really young in that video, much younger than Poe was now. Poe knew that; by the time his father was his age, he himself had been-- well, Shara had been dead, and he remembered that pretty well.

No, Kes had done his fighting as a very young man. But Poe hadn’t ever known he’d been tortured.


End file.
